Skelton The Hollow Mountain

A Rebecca Connolly Thriller
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78885-684-3
Verlag: Polygon
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Reihe: The Rebecca Connolly Thrillers

'The Hollow Mountain is possibly the best yet' - S.G. MacLean The Tunnel Tigers were an elite group of construction workers who specialised in a lucrative but hazardous profession - blasting tunnels through mountains and under rivers, in dangerous conditions few men could endure. Alice Larkin, the headstrong daughter of a millionaire and former news reporter, claims her lover, a Tunnel Tiger, died in mysterious circumstances many years ago, and she wants journalist Rebecca Connolly to investigate. Intrigued, Rebecca throws herself into investigating the story, but she soon comes face to face with an old adversary. Family legacies and influential reputations are at stake - and danger is shockingly close to home.

Douglas Skelton was born in Glasgow. He has been a bank clerk, tax officer, taxi driver (for two days), wine waiter (for two hours), journalist and investigator. He has written several true crime and Scottish criminal history books but now concentrates on fiction. He is the author of the bestselling, MacIlvanney Longlisted Rebecca Connolly thriller series, and the Company of Rogues series.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Skelton, Douglas

Leseproben

1

The sun shone from a clear blue sky and that meant it was time for the young men of Glasgow to follow the tradition of ‘taps aff’. The divesting of upper garments was called for whenever there was the slightest blink of sunshine, but this was a full-on solar stare and so those tops were tossed aside with the abandon of a Chippendale who loved his work.

Rebecca Connolly emerged from Queen Street station into the sunlight and was immediately greeted by the sight of three such individuals, their chests bared, their football tops either carried or tied around their waists to flap at their skinny-jeaned legs like loincloths. She wouldn’t have minded if they had bodies like Ryan Gosling, but one was lean to the point of emaciation, while another looked as if he had imbibed somewhat too freely on cans of Tennent’s lager – one of which he carried in his hand. The third had possibilities, but he would need to commit to more exercise than bending his own elbow. Their skin was pale but in fairness it was still the early summer following a particularly dull winter and spring, so if she was charitable, she might tend to think that the pallor would be burned away by exposure to the old ultraviolet. She suspected, however, that no amount of potentially harmful rays could relieve the unbearable whiteness of their being.

They barely looked at her as she wheeled her suitcase to the edge of the kerb. They were deep in conversation, a fragment of which seemed to relate to a political scandal, which surprised her as she really thought they would be talking football, or sex, or football and sex. She realised she was guilty of profiling, and that annoyed her. The fact that they didn’t give her an appraising glance was something of a relief, and perhaps showed that there was some progress being made in the modern male. Unless they had somehow engineered to disguise it. As she crossed the road, she pursed her lips, conscious that once again she was being judgemental where no such judgement was needed. Was that a sign she was getting older, she wondered. After all, she could see thirty on the horizon.

The sight of the three young men upper garments was certainly a sign that some things in her home city never changed – unlike the railway terminus she had just left, which boasted a shiny new concourse, trendy coffee counters and a general feeling that it had been dragged kicking and screaming into a bright new age of transport. It all looked clean and tidy and, well, spruce, which was a word she never would have thought applied to a station in Glasgow. But spruce it was, and she was strangely proud.

That feeling of unexpected orderliness extended to George Square itself, which stretched to her left. It still had its statues and benches, but such immaculacy seemed somehow alien to her, although if she searched her memory, she really couldn’t recall it ever being particularly cluttered, unless there had been a demonstration, an Old Firm fixture or, in the case of the movie , which used the square as a filming location, an outbreak of zombies. The grand edifice of the City Chambers still loomed at the far end, granite hard like the city around it, the classical frontage screaming of the city’s Victorian prosperity. The road at the western end was now pedestrianised, or it was as far as pedestrians could walk before they were brought to a halt by tables and chairs set out by one of the large pubs that had been hewn out of a former bank headquarters.

The external seating area was already busy with patrons keen to enjoy the summer for however long it lasted – Glaswegians seeing summer as something to be grabbed with both hands and held down, for it could be as fleet of foot as Usain Bolt in a hurry. Her mouth was shaped for a coffee, and perhaps a scone, and she would have enjoyed the opportunity to take a moment to watch the foot traffic because it had been – she made a quick mental calculation – two years since she had last visited Glasgow. Guilt washed over her with the sun. Two years, good God. She had felt the city pull at her while she was in Inverness, but she had never made the journey back. Things just got in the way. Life. Work. Love. All that jazz.

Her phone rang so she stopped, propped her suitcase up on its wheels and fumbled in her jacket pocket. She thumbed the screen to answer it. ‘Hi,’ she said.

‘You landed in the metropolis?’ Stephen’s voice, calling from Inverness.

‘Train just got in, heading to meet Elspeth.’

‘I thought it was tomorrow you were being interviewed?’

Rebecca was in Glasgow to be interviewed for the first of two documentaries based on Elspeth McTaggart’s books about cases on which she had worked. ‘I am, but Elspeth messaged and asked me to meet her this afternoon. Something about a story.’

‘You’re supposed to be on a break.’ Stephen’s voice was even, but she knew there was a note of caution there somewhere. ‘Taking time to see your mum.’

She held the phone with one hand and trundled her case behind. ‘And I will see my mum, but Elspeth is my boss and when the person who transfers money into my bank account every month wants to meet, I’m duty-bound to agree. I’ll head home afterwards.’

She heard him laugh. Or growl. It was difficult to tell with the rush and roar of the city around her. ‘What’s the story, Balamory?’ he asked.

‘She didn’t say. Just that she wanted me to meet someone in a Princes Square café.’

She heard a wince in Stephen’s voice. ‘Ouch, I hope she’s paying, Princes Square ain’t cheap.’

‘If she doesn’t, I may have to wash their dishes for a week. They . . .’ She stopped talking and pursed her lips. ‘Aw, that’s a shame.’

‘What’s a shame?’

‘The Duke of Wellington is still coneless.’

She stopped before turning into Royal Exchange Square to stare at the bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington astride his horse, which was unadorned by its customary traffic cone. Some writer had posted on Twitter about it the day before and she had half-expected the unofficial headgear to have been replaced overnight, but there he was, still bareheaded. Even the horse seemed perplexed by the turn of events.

‘You Glaswegians and that traffic cone. I’ll never understand the affection for it.’

‘It’s a tradition.’

For as long as she could remember there had been a traffic cone on the Iron Duke’s head, occasionally with one on his steed’s for good measure. At times the colours of the cones would change, during the Scottish independence referendum, for instance, or in support of Ukraine when Russia invaded. Seeing it in this condition was, to her eye, all kinds of wrong. She knew there were people who saw the cone as something akin to vandalism, but she didn’t. For her it was an example of the Glasgow she loved – cheeky, even cocky, unabashed and showing a lack of deference.

‘How are things in the Sneck?’ she asked. ‘How was court?’

‘Inverness is sunny and warm. Court was dull and boring.’

‘You didn’t get to be Atticus Finch, then?’

Amazingly Stephen had never read when she met him. That should have been sufficient for Rebecca to end the relationship right there, but she had set about educating him instead, not only ensuring he read Harper Lee’s book, but also watching the film with him. Luckily for him, he loved them both. Gregory Peck always reminded Rebecca of her father, not because he looked like the actor but because she saw John Connolly as being as wise and as caring as Atticus Finch.

‘Not today,’ Stephen said. He never talked about his day in court. It used to bother her, but not so much now. ‘Will you still be back in time for the dinner at the weekend?’

It was his parents’ wedding anniversary and a family dinner had been arranged at a luxury country house hotel overlooking Loch Ness. Rebecca wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but she would attend. She had learned that give and take was the name of the game in relationships.

‘Of course I’ll be there,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’

Little lies were also part of the game.

He laughed, also playing along. ‘Yes, sure.’

Stephen knew she didn’t particularly relish the idea of the gathering, not because she didn’t like his family but because she was uncomfortable with anything remotely formal. She was a jeans-and-comfy-shoes kinda girl, and for this event she would have to smarten up.

She turned into Buchanan Street now, the foot traffic increasing in the busy pedestrian retail area. She skirted round a crowd clustered in front of a street magician doing something wondrous with cards. From somewhere further down came the skirl of the pipes and the beat of a drum. ‘I’m almost there, can we talk later?’

He said of course and the call ended. She put her phone back in her pocket and weaved between the shoppers towards the iron canopy over the entrance of the Princes Square shopping centre.

If the traffic cone headgear was an illustration of Glasgow’s cheeky side, then Buchanan Street – known as the Style Mile – and Princes Square were prime examples of its constant reach for upward mobility. It had ever been a thrusting city, a scrappy urchin determined...